Just before I left New York I was overwhelmed by a feeling of weightlessness. It’s the same feeling that strikes when I dream that the world is just about to end. The world wasn’t going to end, but it was going to change, and so I bopped around New York with the reckless indiscretion of a pinball, like someone whose actions are at once both crucial and meaningless. I had things that I needed to do and things that I needed to tell people, and maybe they would hurt them or maybe they would hurt me but I couldn’t move West without getting them out of my system.
There was someone in New York who was falling for me. Outside of a highrise apartment building in the mid-fifties with the early summer sun creasing the corners of the grid I said goodbye to him, my face broad and moonlike tilted up towards his. I knew he was thinking about kissing me and we were both scared like kids who prior to this had only ever practiced kissing on our hands. If he had moved his face any closer I would have run, back into the highrise, up the elevator, and straight to the kitchen for another beer. He was falling in love with me but he didn’t love me yet so he patted my hair and said, “Good luck in California.” It was really hot that day, too hot for May—my dress was sticking to my collarbone uncomfortably. He started making his way down the sidewalk and I flicked my wrist in a half-hearted attempt at a wave. Later, with the safe distance of 3,000 miles between us, he told me, “You bolted into my life and shook everything around, and then left before I could understand what you had done.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I was a hurricane those last few weeks; volcanic, spewing my feelings everywhere without a single thought to the consequences they’d have on the people I left behind.
He was wearing his glasses. I liked when he wore his glasses. “You were here and suddenly you were gone. It felt like camp was over.” I thought that was a sweet thing to say.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the writing process recently, and how much it differs from person to person. Writing is one of the only activities in which the goal is the same–to produce quality textual work–but the process by which you achieve that goal is completely inconsistent. Some of the writers I know churn out their best work just as dawn sidles up, cup of coffee in hand, brains fresh and ready for intensive mining. I tend to have my best ideas right before falling asleep. Every night as I drift off I find myself constructing phrases and sentences in my head that contribute to the ever progressing narrative of my life. When I was younger, I used to keep a notebook next to my bed for just this reason. But having grown up with insomnia, I often fear that getting up to jot down my ideas will trigger a writing frenzy–soon it’s 3am and I’m shaking the kinks out of my aching wrists, having written and edited a draft that began with just a measly string of words and a hypnic jerk. Now, so much of my best ideas are consumed by the heaviness that invades the space between my eyes just before sleep. When I told this to a friend, he responded, “If you want to be the best at what you do, you’re going to have to get up in the middle of the night and write, even if you’re exhausted.” He’s right.
On the walk home tonight, I passed by a sidewalk covered in chalk drawings. There were spiders and rocketships and a sailboat perched on a rocky sea getting pummeled by lightning. You could tell which of the drawings had been done by adults and which had been done by children, because the ones drawn by children were much more imaginative. I looked at the drawings for a little while and thought about how nice it would be to just lie down next to them. The sidewalk would be cold and I would get chalk on my clothes but it might feel like disappearing into another world, a world where dinosaurs still exist and the sun has a sweet, charming face.
The trouble with living in a city that isn’t built on a grid is that, with a sense of direction like mine, I get lost very easily. On side streets that turn suddenly into 35% grade hills, in BART stations on the outskirts of the city and in gourmet produce markets I am consistently lost and alone.
I think that caring about someone is not minding getting lost with them, and last night I told the only person in this city willing to do so with me that I couldn’t see him anymore.
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This American Life gave me a real appreciation for the oral story, and in this ‘new media environment,’ I wanted to see if I could do anything cool with the medium. If you hate to read, or you simply prefer audio to text, you can listen to me read some of my essays on my podcast page (I did not pay for Pro, so forgive the design hideousness). I’ll embed the ones I’ve recorded after each post.
We’ll see if this sticks.
According to Joe, apparently some dudes would “never date a girl who listens to Best Coast” because she basically sings solely about her cat and getting stoned and how much guys suck. I don’t know, that kind of sounds like the life of every 20-something girl I know, so I hope these anti-Best Coast dudes are down to date cougars or something. Like anti/post/pseudo/whatever feminists Carrie Bradshaw and Liz Lemon, Best Coast helps me to accept the crazy in myself, but they also illuminate an upside: while sometimes I feel rather insane, I know that I will never be crazy enough to move to Paris for a dude or hang an unnecessary wedding dress on my unused treadmill.
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I went to the ocean because I wanted to feel small. Even though I grew up less than an hour from the coast, my family was never really one for the beach, so we only took a handful of vacations there. I spent the last four years of my life on an island and never once went swimming–the rivers that flank Manhattan reek of chemicals, and Coney Island was a seemingly endless subway ride away. But San Francisco is a place that is so tied to the sea that the slightest shifting of the earth’s crust could send the entire city sliding right into it. Yesterday I rented a car and I drove across the city, up and over Twin Peaks, through the Inner Sunset and along the southern edge of Golden Gate Park, until the road dead ended and all I could see was the ocean. I wanted to look out at its vastness and feel swallowed, the same way one might when gazing intently at the night’s sky. I’m drawn to the sea’s impermanence: nothing remains, everything shifts and erodes. I went to the ocean because I wanted to feel alive in a way that only being humbled can evoke.
Last night I went to a ’social media party’ and became acutely aware of the fact that I suffer from Social Anxiety Disorder. I stood in the middle of the Grand Hyatt with my glass of wine and looked around anxiously, trying to find someone to talk to but not really wanting to talk to anyone anyway. I don’t know how to be normal in large groups of strangers. I can never come up with the right thing to say; I can never come up with anything to say. Sometimes I wish that when you met people, the culturally polite thing to do would be to give them a hug. I think we would all feel more relaxed in social situations if conversations began just after we threw our arms around each other.
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A few weeks ago, at a party thrown by a SF newspaper, some of the staffers incorrectly accused my friend and I of working at their rival publication, teasing that they’d “meet us at the flagpole.” (LOL) Bizarre schoolyard metaphors aside, my friend was frazzled. “Why did they say that?” she demanded. “What does that even mean?”
I giggled my way up the stairs, empowered by this smartass display of purposeless rivalry. “Wow! That reminded me of New York!” I exclaimed breathlessly, as I climbed into her car. Why was I so giddy that some local newspaper staffers had been coyly dickish towards me? I don’t know, but I totally was! Is this some form of professional masochism? I was genuinely excited to bear witness to the kind of petty journalism infighting I was trying to escape by leaving New York. You can take the girl out of the blog-o-sphere…
I don’t really want to leave the blog-o-sphere, though. I just want to leave the pettiness. I think that’s what I’m trying to accomplish by living here, but my Google Reader has stayed more or less the same for the past three years.